As rescuers have found two black boxes, the tragic final messages of passengers on the doomed Indonesian aircraft that crashed into the sea with 62 people on board have been revealed.
Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 departed for a 90-minute flight over the Java Sea between Jakarta and Pontianak in West Kalimantan from Soekarno-Hatta international airport.
But the Boeing B737-500 plummeted nearly 10,000ft in less than 60 seconds at 2.40 pm – just four minutes after takeoff – with witnesses saying they had heard two explosions.
Soerjanto Tjahjanto, head of the Indonesian Transportation Safety Agency, said the authorities had discovered the two black boxes in the sea, and now divers are attempting to locate them, along with body parts and aircraft debris.
It comes as the horrific last messages and posts were exposed before the crash as pictures were exchanged on the plane.
A selfie was shared by Ratih Windania with her three kids laughing as the family boarded the plane.
She said: “Bye-bye family. We’re heading home for now.”
The message was sent just before they boarded the plane from the Indonesian capital.
‘Pray for us,’ her brother Irfansyah Riyanto posted on Instagram with a picture of the family.
He said that his family was initially planning on taking a different flight, but at the last minute, they changed.
Irfansyah hurried to Jakarta’s Soekarno Hatta airport late on Saturday, like hundreds of other desperate relatives. He was still hoping for good news on Sunday about his sister and four other family members on the flight, his parents included.
“We feel powerless, we can only wait and hope to have any information soon,” Irfansyah told reporters.
Irfansyah said that his relatives were originally supposed to take an earlier flight run by the NAM Air unit of Sriwijaya and he was unsure why that had changed.
At the end of a three-week holiday, his sister and her two children were on a 740 km (460 miles) ride home to Pontianak on the island of West Kalimantan.
“I was the one who drove them to the airport, helped with the check-ins and the luggage … I feel like I still can’t believe this and it happened too fast,’ Irfansyah said.
Police also requested families to provide information to help identify any recovered remains, such as dental records and samples of DNA.
A fisherman named Solihin told the BBC that when he saw a plane crash into the water close to his ship, he was at sea.
‘The plane fell like lightning into the sea and exploded in the water. It was pretty close to us, the shards of a kind of plywood almost hit my ship.
“We thought it was a bomb or a tsunami since after that we saw the big splash from the water,”
“It was raining heavily and the weather was so bad… We were very shocked and directly saw the plane debris and the fuel around our boat,”
Locals on a nearby island said they heard two explosions before they found a pair of jeans floating in the sea with metal parts, cables, and bits.
Fifty-six passengers were on board the 26-year-old aircraft, including seven children and three toddlers, two pilots, and four cabin crew.
Source: Daily Mail